If you’re going to present to a live audience any time soon and you’d like to find out how to maximize the stage or make your stage presence felt in such a way that your audience will get more engaged, here are five tips you can follow:

Make your main point from the middle because this is the power position. Go back to this position whenever you’re stressing a point.

Move to the left and right, like from left to right for instance, which is the direction of the passage of time especially when sharing something in chronological order.

Walk forward when emphasizing something.

Move into your audience’s space to increase their trust and grab their attention.

Analyze your movement. Record yourself on video and review your movement from start to finish so you can correct your flaws.

When we give presentations, it’s mostly either an informative one or a persuasive one. What’s the difference? And are there similarities? Read on…

Persuasive presentations are typically used when you’re selling a product or a service or trying to convince your audience to do something. Presentations like this evoke emotions to trigger something in the audience that will make them buy your product or hire your service.

Informative presentations, on the other hand, are usually for training and education purposes. It may involve a little bit of persuasion at first but typically this is when the presenter would want his or her audience to remember the data or facts being given.

So when you present, know first what you’re goal is. Are you trying to inform or are you trying to persuade? To know more about this, please head to:

Ellen recently gave a webinar about upgrading to PowerPoint 2013. During the event, she explained all the new features PowerPoint 2013 has to offer as well as how to use them. In the webinar, she discussed 2 features that are very difficult which is why she decided to share them on her blog.

Our brain can only accommodate so many things at a time. So if you give your audience lists or a bunch of ideas, they’ll be able to remember only about 7 plus or minus 2 things of what you presented. What you do to make your audience remember your presentation is to attach emotions to your presentation. In other words, tell powerful stories.

There are 5 kinds of stories you can tell and which audience find irresistible:

Quest

Stranger in a Strange Land

Rags to Riches

Revenge

Love Story

All these types of stories will make you jump right into the deeper parts of their brain where emotions work together with memory so your audience will be able to remember your presentation better. When they hear your story, especially when told well, they will compare it with those that they’ve already heard or experience and log them into their long term memory.

Sometimes, even when information about how to create powerful and effective presentations abound, some presenters continue to stick to their old ways of presenting even if it’s obvious that their audience hates it and worse, does not help bring in sales to their company. So how would you convince your executives for instance that presenters will have to undergo some sort of presentation skills training in order to make their company presentations better and more effective?

In this blog post, How to convince executives that presenters need presentation skills training, Ellen teaches us some things you can do. Here are a few of them:

1. Point to recent failures so they are made aware that the current way of presenting is not working. 2. Explain the research. Back it up with facts. 3. Show before and after examples. This will let them see for themselves that there are better ways of doing things.

When it comes to training people, persuasion and emotion play an important role to get the results you need and the effect you desire for your employees, trainees or people. Persuasion and emotion are not only best left to sales and proposal presentations but they contribute a lot to training too. For instance, you can reward employees who follow the rules or who did something good for a customer or did something way beyond their call of duty.